To view the diacritics on this page, you must install the
Indic Times font on your machine and have a browser capable of
displaying the Unicode (utf-8) character set.
ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 15, 2008
Buddhism and Speciesism: on the Misapplication of Western Concepts to Buddhist Beliefs
In this article, I defend Buddhism from Paul Waldau’s charge of speciesism.
I argue that Waldau attributes to Buddhism various notions that it
does not necessarily have, such as the ideas that beings are morally considerable
if they possess certain traits, and that humans, as morally considerable
beings, ought never to be treated as means. These ideas may
not belong in Buddhism, and for Waldau’s argument to work, he needs to
show that they do. Moreover, a closer look at his case reveals a more significant
problem for ecologically minded Buddhists—namely that the
Pāli texts do not seem to attribute intrinsic value to any form of life at
all, regardless of species. Thus, I conclude that rather than relying on
Western concepts, it may be preferable to look for a discourse from within
the tradition itself to explain why Buddhists ought to be concerned
about the natural world.
